Kylian Mbappé was offside eight times against Barcelona. Vinicius, three. The beginning of the end for Madrid in a classic that put the whites into a black hole after a hesitant start to the season.
One of the issues that had become clear in the first three months of Madrid post-Toni Kroos is that the youngsters in the midfield have not yet managed to put together the team’s game. They still needed Luka Modric’s 39 years. The good thing for them was supposed to be that the classic, with Barça’s radical proposal to advance the defense to the midfield, prevented them from going through that drink from the start. A brief move could be enough for them and they could send a long ball in search of Vinicius and Mbappé. Even with a kick from his own field, as Valverde tried after half an hour and which the former PSG player did not take full advantage of. The night followed the script and the match was focused on those few meters where the white attackers moved to try to conquer the land that the Barça defenders left behind them. The equation seemed favorable to their interests; However, they were never able to decipher it. Two of the most accredited players on the planet to attack space were trapped in the very fine and effective spider web directed by Cubarsí and Iñigo Martínez. They were dropping like flies on offsides. Up to 12 all night. Above all, French.
“The scoreboard does not reflect what happened. I liked the first part, intensely. It was good, and I am not wrong because I have been in football for 48 years,” said Carlo Ancelotti. “We barely scored and their goals took all our energy away. Then it was another game because we took risks at the back and they had space,” analyzed the broken voice of the Italian, who attributed the spectacular result to the risks they took in the final half hour.
The white coach called on his people to hope for improvement and to learn from every defeat to navigate the storm that a fall of these dimensions opens. “There is nothing to throw away. It is not serious or correct. You have to be self-critical, but not throw everything away. Surely we are going to improve and we will not be far from the previous season, when we won the League and the Champions League,” the Italian insisted. Madrid had not lost at home since April 8, 2023 (2-3 against Villarreal), a rather inconsequential setback when compared to this thunderous 0-4.
Ancelotti, who a week ago recognized that round-trip matches are better for his team because he does not have the pieces to play in small spaces, still demanded calm in the first minutes, for his players to chew the ball a little more, the sight of his game so direct. But they didn’t pay much attention to him and, when they had to play from behind, the attempt almost always ended in fright for them. Lucas Vázquez, Mendy and Rüdiger left several losses behind.
Everything hung by a thread, a few centimeters between the culé rearguard and the two local stars. With no major threats yet for Lunin, the match led to a sequence of offsides. The eight at halftime were the meringues’ highest number in a first half in the League since a match against Celta in 2013. And when Vinicius or Mbappé managed to get around the net, they didn’t do well either. Until Lewandowski’s double blow, every White attack was a near miss. But there it stayed, on the border. Cubarsí and Iñigo Martínez kept the Brazilian and French at bay in the face of general astonishment. His movements and shipments never matched up. “It was known that they use this high line and we almost didn’t take advantage of it,” lamented Ancelotti in reference to the offsides and mistakes against Iñaki Peña when they were saving the penultimate culé dam.
The Bernabéu reached half-time with the feeling of a lost opportunity, of prey escaping alive from a battalion of shotguns, and the feeling became flesh after the break. Mendy did break the meccano of the white defense and Lewandowski did not forgive. And not upside down the next blink.
“The team competed for 60 minutes. We have to forget the last 30. I don’t regret anything about the approach. The idea was to press and we did it for an hour. This defeat is different from that of Lille; We don’t compete there,” Ancelotti concluded in the middle of the storm.
